Aeron’s healing hit Fin like cold water poured over a third-degree burn, spreading down his ribs, sealing the gash in his side, knitting torn muscle back together with a precision that his body accepted and his mind completely ignored.

He had been gutted before. Stabbed, broken, dragged through fights that should have killed him twice over. None of it had ever made his hands shake. They were shaking now, but not from the wounds. From the image seared into his skull of Serena standing alone on that mountain, surrounded, with Gavriel bleeding out beside her and no extraction coming.

Next to him, Hyran was pouring healing magic into Dexmon. The bleeding had stopped, but there were more stab wounds on his body in comparison and worse than Fin’s by a factor of ’a vampire king tried to kill him personally.’

The good news: Dexmon Drakenfell was alive. The bad news: Dexmon Drakenfell was alive, awake, and being told his mate was still on the mountain. The bad news was about to become significantly louder.

Dexmon’s eyes opened.

They were gold. Burning. The eyes of a dragon prince who had woken up in the wrong place and was going to make that everyone’s problem.

“Serena. Where is she? What happened? What did they do to you, what did they do to Serena?”

Hyran didn’t soften the answer. “She’s still up there.”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the chamber.

Aeron kept healing Fin, faster now, both hands on his shoulders, magic pouring in with an urgency that betrayed his composure.

“I need to get to her,” Dexmon said, attempting to sit up.

“Dexmon, stop moving. You’re still bleeding out,” Hyran ordered, pressing harder against his chest, magic seeping into the deeper wounds that were still trying to bleed him dry from the inside.

“Don’t…” Dexmon snarled, trying to shove Hyran’s hand away. “Get me a portal back there.”

Hyran gave him a flat look and continued healing, not dignifying that with a response.

“GET ME BACK UP THERE!”

Dexmon’s roar bounced off the stone walls like a living thing, ripping out of him with the force of a man who was watching the worst thing he could imagine happen in real time from a place where he could do absolutely nothing about it.

The rune beneath him blazed again, gold light surging, reacting to his desperation, his rage, as if the magic itself wanted to obey him and the physics refused to cooperate.

Fin put his hand on Dexmon’s arm.

“Dex.” His voice dropped low. Deadly. The particular register Fin used when the situation was beyond fucked and the only path forward was through the man in front of him. “Look at me.”

Dexmon met his eyes.

Fin’s jaw flexed once.

“We’re going to get her. All of us. But you can’t go back if you bleed out on the floor.” Every word was a nail driven into concrete. His tone was firm.

Dexmon’s breath shook. His hands shook harder.

He didn’t argue. He knew what his body couldn’t do. And he knew what that cost Serena for every second he stayed down.

Hyran continued healing him, magic seeping deeper now, threading through tissue and muscle. Color returned to Dexmon’s face as the worst of the wounds closed.

“Did you see Dexmon vanish?” Hyran asked, his voice carefully neutral in a way that meant his brain was running calculations his mouth wasn’t ready to share.

“Yes,” Fin said.

“How much time passed between his disappearance and your arrival here?”

“Over two hours.”

Hyran went still.

Then he exhaled slowly. The kind of exhale that carries the weight of a conclusion you wish you hadn’t reached.

“That’s… interesting. On our end, you two reappeared seconds apart. It’s been maybe a minute since we last saw either of you.”.

Aeron frowned, already doing the math.

“Which means time inside the trial is distorted If the pattern holds, it’s likely been another three hours for them since Fin was pulled.”

Three hours.

Serena and Gavriel. Three hours. Against a horde that had overwhelmed four of them.

Fin pressed his knuckles against the stone floor hard enough to feel the grinding in his joints. Three hours. He could picture every minute of it. Gav burning through energy he didn’t have, trying to keep her behind him. Serena doing something reckless because she’d decided Gavriel’s life was worth more than her own.

“Gavriel hasn’t appeared,” Aeron added. “They both have cuffs. Assuming those still work.”

The words were meant to reassure. They didn’t. They landed like a coin tossed to a drowning man, technically accurate and completely fucking useless.

The cuffs. Dexmon tried mindlinking, even as Hyran’s magic threaded through the last of his wounds.

Dexmon: Serena. Serena, respond.

Nothing.

Fin: Gav. Report. Now.

Silence.

Aeron and Hyran tried as well. Same result. A dead, echoing void where their packmates should have been, like shouting into a well with no bottom.

Fin’s stomach dropped.

Dexmon’s eyes went dead cold. The gold bled out of them, replaced by something flat and empty and infinitely more dangerous.

“They’re on their own.”

Maelor exchanged a glance with Aeron, neither mage liked the math.

“The mindlink is down, yes,” Hyran said, not looking up from Dexmon’s wounds. “That doesn’t mean the cuffs are broken. It means the cuffs are trying to communicate across a temporal rift that shouldn’t exist, which is a different problem entirely. The connection has been unreliable all day. Add time dilation into the equation, and I’d be more surprised if the mindlink was working. What matters is the extraction protocol fired for both of you. The magic held. Focus on that.”

✦✦✦

VAMPIRE VOLCANO VACATION ISLAND

Gavriel and Serena watched in horror as Fin vanished.

One second he was there, bleeding, fighting, gold-eyed and furious. The next, the air swallowed him whole and left nothing behind except the blood on the wall where he’d been pinned.

Gone. The same way Dex had gone. The same impossible, mid-breath disappearance that offered zero explanation and even less comfort.